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Chapter 3

These wounds won't seem to heal, this pain is just too real

There's just too much that time can not erase

I am creeping ahead, always following the road. A car nears and then drives past me. I turn my head slowly.

The red backlights are nearly to crude in this nearly colorless winter-dawn, but I realize nonetheless that it's a Jaguar. You don't see such cars often in Stars Hollow, at least not since Richard and Emily Gilmore had died.

The weather had been similar when the phone had rung and a hysterical Emily had told us that her husband was dead.

The one time she hadn't been able to keep the composure, for they hadn't made plans how to tell Lorelai her father was dead, after Richards's first heart attack.

A settlement was made for what to do when your partner dies, which you can execute strategically, that was something only those two could come up with.

How much they had been affected by this topic had showed in the fact that they had forgotten to plan how Emily should tell Lorelai,

Maybe they would have sent a card other wise, or even a fax would have been a possibility otherwise, you could never know with what they would do.

I guess you had to come from their world and live in their world to understand them.

Lorelai never understood them and neither have I. Sometimes I felt like I had been beamed into an alternate universe like on the Enterprise and they were speaking marsian.

It had been like this right from our first meeting on and never changed.

Everything they did seemed strange to me and I never understood how they operated.

In the beginning they had tried to get to know me in their very special way. Emily invited me to dinner and Richard took me out to play golf with him.

During this time they had been separated and acted like loons. So much that Lorelai was laughing about it on the outside, while on the inside she really wanted them to get back together, which in the end, they did.

Richard without Emily or Emily without Richard, not possible. They fitted together, needed each other, loved each other. Like Lorelai and me, but different.

Their relationship with Lorelai relaxed with time and as often as they fought, tried to tell us what to do or criticized Lorelai I am convinced, that both, beside each other, loved one person the most: Their only daughter.

This was the thing that connected us and brought us together time and time again: Our incapacity to be without Lorelai.

Lorelai's facial expression after Emily had told her that her father was dead can only be described with one word: Shock.

As Emily was trying to keep her composure, Lorelai clung to me and cried uncontrollably.

Her fingers dug through my shirt in my back while I held her and tried to help her get over a thing I had never done myself: the loss of a father.

Together we told the kids and then drove to the Gilmore Mansion which was now only Emily's.

In the driveway stood a Jaguar, just like the one that passed me while I am dragging myself through town.

I think we couldn't have been prepared for what followed.

At first, when we arrived at the house Emily was angry. Furious even. She had thrown all of Richards's things into the pool and we were still drying clothes, papers and photos weeks later.

The desperate Emily had made place for a fury, who blustered through the house and intended to turn everything into debris and ashes. If it wouldn't have been so sad and desperate Lorelai and I would have laughed.

With several Scotch's, two cigarettes and a lot of cajoling Lorelai finally succeeded to get Emily to sit down.

For hours she sat with the empty glass in the living room and starred into space, while Lorelai sat beside her in silence and didn't have the heart to take her mother's hand. Who could have predicted the consequences?

So she held mine even tighter while we sat hour after hour in the desolated living-room, which still looked a bit like the castle of Louis XIV.

Sometime Emily said the last words, that sounded like words of Emily Gilmore. – He promised me I could go first- she said into the silent room and Lorelai and I looked at each other in astonishment, unsure if she had really said that.

I nodded at her when I realized that this was just another thing only the Gilmore's could come up with. An arrangement who would die first.

I am shaking my head while I am remembering this scene and burst out laughing. Rory should write a book about those two and even then nobody would believe you.

But then I remember what followed.

With a ship you would call it a nemesis, with a house you would speak of a slow dereliction, but when you are talking about a human being? I have to ask Lorelai about a word for it, she knows it for sure and if not she will make something up.

But that is exactly what happened. Emily decayed in front of all our eyes very slowly and more painful than any of us could have imagined.

She didn't plan anymore, she didn't argue anymore, she didn't criticize anymore and she didn't go out anymore.

A broken woman, I think that describes it best.

And while Lorelai worried how the kids would take it, I worried about my wife, because no-one knew better than me how much Lorelai loved her parents.

Now her father was dead and her mother shattered into so many pieces, that even Lorelai wasn't able to put them back together.

Sometimes when the kids and Lorelai were around her you could still get a glimpse of the old Emily Gilmore, but just for a second before it vanished again.

In the end she declined more and more, got forgetful, absent-minded, weak. Lorelai had just started to argue if we should move her in with us, hire a nurse for her at home or bring her to a nursing home, when she just fell asleep, and died.

One had sensed that she didn't want to live anymore, not for her grandchildren and not for Lorelai.

If Richard's death had made Lorelai incredibly sad, Emily's death devastated her.

Two days before her death Emily had basked in memories again and had told Lorelai casually how proud Richard and her had always been about her and how much they loved her.

Lorelai had cried that night and had posed the question how it was possible that her mother had to lose her husband and get dementia that she told her for the first time how she felt about her.

It might have been the cynicism of this relationship that those two loved each other so much but had argued their whole life.

Rory had come to this funeral from some place on the earth. After her break from Yale she had always worked towards her goal to become a journalist and had succeeded.

She was one of those business-women about whom you ask yourself why they're not married, 'cause they're nice.

The men in Rory's life came and went, she doesn't have kids.

The last one she met with a bit over forty stayed and they are still living together.

They're not married.

Why? I don't know, Lorelai doesn't know.

Maybe neither of them posed the question because they are happy as it is?

Jordan is a nice guy and if he ever hurts her I might not kick his butt, because I'm not able to get my leg that high anymore, but for some flourish with the cane it would still suffice. After all he isn't the youngest anymore either.

She was together with Logan for quite a while, after that she had a boyfriend from Spain, but he didn't want kids. Then came a doctor from Chicago and an engineer from Germany until she finally met Jordan, who is a journalist also.

He understood her urge to travel and to write about politics, because that's what she did. She worked as a political journalist for the New York Times.

Lorelai told me once that they tried to get pregnant for a while when Rory was over forty already.

But the luck that Lorelai and I were granted they hadn't.

I think you can't have everything in life. Lorelai got pregnant at sixteen and sacrificed so many things for Rory's sake, that it wouldn't have been fair if she would have to spend her life alone after Rory moved out.

Rory never lacked anything and Lorelai made sure of that and so god, fate, foreordination or coincidence, or how ever you want to call it, denied her for the first time something: Her own kid.

But Rory wouldn't be Rory if she would become desperate because of this and she and Jordan are still making the craziest trips all around the world.

Yesterday they came back from Greenland. From this fact alone you know that she really is her mother's daughter. A trip to Greenland in winter, they are one sandwich short off a picnic!

I reach into my pocket and take out a handkerchief, lay it in between my hand and the cane, for the callus which I have on my hand from this damn thing are hurting.

But what don't you all take on?

TBC